Back in 2001, Coudal Partners was on the ropes fiscally. And according to Jim Coudal, it’s the best thing that could have happened.

"After 9/11, we lost a lot of business. And we were in trouble. It wasn’t any problem of ours. One company got bought and other people cut back on their spending," he explains. "It’s the best thing that ever happened to us because we pulled back and said, ‘Well, do we wanna build up this whole thing again and go chase business that we don’t want and get into pitches and win or not win business based on the whims of people who are stupider than we are? Or is there another way?’"

It was the culmination of years of frustration from doing client work. "We never really maximized our creative potential by, I can say it, whoring ourselves out to people who knew less than we did," he says. "If you have the skills to do client work, you have the skills to make your own product. You’re selling yourself short by selling that on a work for hire basis."

To illustrate his point, he brings up the product that now generates the most revenue for the company: Field Notes. "We do a good job marketing it," he explains. "We sell hundreds of thousands of these things and we make money out of it. If I did that same work for this other company called Yard Notes and we did exactly the same work, they’d paid us $50,000 for the work and then sell a million of the memo books. We didn’t get any of that million that our work did. From an economic standpoint, that’s the essential inequality. Your own stuff is potentially more lucrative and also comes with peace of mind — and not having those ulcers that come with knowing full well that you know better than the client but still have to kneel down."

Evolving goals
Coudal started out decades ago as a creative director for a big Chicago ad agency working on high profile accounts. But even then, he wasn’t happy with the system. He’d reach goals he set for himself yet still found himself dissatisfied.

"There’s this great quote by Dan Gilbert. He said that the reason that most of us are so unhappy most of the time is that we make our goals for the people we are when we set them, not for the people we’re gonna be when we reach them," Coudal explains. “And when I started at an ad agency I said, ‘I need to be a creative director. I need to be a hotshot creative director in an agency that’s highly visible.’ And I got there and was miserable doing work I wasn’t particularly proud of for people I didn’t like."

That’s when he left and, along with partners Susan Everett and Kevin Guilfoile, started a new eponymous agency. Despite the new company, the result was a familiar feeling. He says, "I wanted to bill $20 million and win some Addy Awards. That’s what we wanted to do. So we just kept pushing. And then adding people and growing and working for clients and we never evaluated whether this is really what we wanted to do. We were just trying to get to this arbitrary goal for no reason at all.

"I had set goals early without reevaluating where I was in terms of my happiness as a person. And I had to feed the beast. If you start adding people, then you gotta bring in more work and sometimes you gotta bring in work that you’re not particularly fond of in order to make the payroll to pay the more people that you’re hiring to do the work that you’re not particularly fond of.

“I had set goals early without reevaluating where I was in terms of my happiness as a person. And I had to feed the beast.”

"One thing leads to another and all of a sudden you look at the work you’re producing and you’re not proud of it and you’re out at the bar after work making fun of your clients. That’s funny for a little while, but that’s no way to go through life. It makes you jaded. If you don’t like your job, there’s something wrong. And going to the bar and complaining about your job is a symptom of something wrong.”

Building an audience
That’s when the 2001 downturn occurred. Despite the negative environment at the time, one thing going well for the agency was Coudal.com, one of the first design-related blogs to gain popularity. "I kind of started blogging although there was no word ‘blogging’ at the time," he says. "We started updating the site every day with interesting links to other places on the web. And people reacted. People were coming to watch and we were running Photoshop Tennis just for fun and people were watching that. I sort of figured if all these people are coming to our site every day, they must be like us somehow and maybe we could find a way to make something that they’d be interested in buying.

"So we made an arbitrary decision that within two years we wanted half of our revenue to come from things that we own rather than from work that we did for other people. Then we went back and did a lot of crappy work for people to make payroll."

“Within two years we wanted half of our revenue to come from things that we own rather than from work that we did for other people.”

A film project the firm worked on led to a lightbulb moment. "We did a series of artist profile films that were very popular online and were seen hundreds of thousands of times," explains Coudal. "We were approached by somebody in the UK about reformulating it as an episodic television. As we were getting a pilot together we were looking for a way to package the DVDs that we were gonna send over. And there were really no good options for package. There was a lot of crappy CD packaging available but Kevin had received a stock photo disk from somebody in Europe in this really sweet case. And so we found another one and we tore it apart and we turned it into the case for our pilot and we sent it off to London."

Though the film series never turned into anything, the case did. Coudal says, "It was difficult to find a packaging system for CDs and DVDs that would reflect the amount of work we have put into what’s on the CD and the DVD. So we tracked down where the case came from. It turns out it was licensed through Philips in the Netherlands and we made a deal with the company in the Netherlands to represent them in the United States. Then to make it easy for people to make the cases, we made templates and pre-perforated paper that runs through the printer. We came up with Jewelboxing and that was very successful. Soon we were generating enough revenue from Jewelboxing to take the pressure off and to not have to chase client work as much. We still had more than half of our billings with clients but, also, we had this business."

The Deck
The next product domino fell as a result of the firm’s struggle to advertise the cases. Coudal explains, "That’s actually why we started The Deck, because it was such a pain in the ass to advertise Jewelboxing to the people we wanted to reach — meaning design web and creative professionals, filmmakers, animators, photographers, illustrators, coders, animators and all these kind of people. It was impossible to reach them all at once. You had to buy a thousand little buys on a thousand little sites and it was a royal clusterfuck and so that actually motivated us to start The Deck. If we can’t find a way to advertise our product, let’s make a way because there’s gotta be other people like us who wanna reach that audience. Now there are 55 sites on The Deck and last month we served up over 100 million ads for advertisers like Microsoft, Adobe, and Rackspace."

The firm realized the system they had in place could be used for other products too. "We built our own fulfillment system and we knew how to market online and we knew how to process payments and we knew how to do customer service," he says. "We were gradually building an automated pack-and-ship system and we’re building shopping carts and all of that so it became pretty obvious that we need to find another thing to sell because we have all this knowledge we’ve learned. It’s not just the physical infrastructure but the mental infrastructure.”

“We have all this knowledge we’ve learned. It’s not just the physical infrastructure but themental infrastructure.”

"An authentic American brand"
That’s when Field Notes dropped into Coudal’s lap. "Aaron Draplin out of Portland came up with this idea of a little Field Notes notebook and sent them out to his friends as a kind of a goofy gift. And the day that I got it, I called him up and I said, ‘Let’s make some of these and sell them.’ And he said OK. We did a short run and opened the site up and made 13 sales on the first day. We thought, ‘Well, that’s sort of interesting.’"

Coudal felt the big player in the field, Moleskine, was ripe for taking down. "I was not buying the bullshit from Moleskine about the Picasso notebook that’s made in China," he says. "And I personally needed a notebook I could carry with me. And I liked the aesthetic of them, the sort of 1930s and 40s mid-American agricultural design, the Futura typeface, the fact that we are only sourcing materials from the United States. The paper is milled in the United States. The ink is produced in the United States. They’re assembled and printed in the United States. There’s something about the Field Notes that’s equally as attractive to a coffee-swirling hipster in Brooklyn as it is to a beer-swilling mammal killer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; This is a true authentic American brand.”

That authenticity is carried across all the marketing too. "In our marketing of Field Notes we don’t have any rules except for one: no fiction," explains Coudal. "So we can’t make a commercial about a happy family using Field Notes because that’s not a real happy family. So if we’re gonna make a film about Field Notes, we can make a film about the printer who actually printed them. But it’s got to be him. We can make documentaries that sell Field Notes, but we can’t make stories that sell Field Notes.

Field Notes has also taken an unusual approach to in-store sales by targeting clothing retailers instead of stationery stores. "We’re in 300 stores now — and in big places like J. Crew," he explains. "But we didn’t approach it like ‘We made this stationery project, let’s get this into paper stores.’ We did exactly the opposite. Our first target was men’s fashion so we were selling them into stores that were selling interesting iconic American brands of shoes, belts, and pants. And it allowed us to bypass the whole idea of going to the paper show and competing against all the other notebooks in the world because we weren’t interested in it."

Satisfying curiosityDespite the varied efforts, one consistent theme for the firm is a sense of curiosity and playfulness (e.g. the recent Above the Sun film short or the image from the Jewelboxing site to the right). That attitude attracts kindred spirits. "In our experimental films, in our contests, in our blog postings, and the products we make, we are trying to satiate our own curiosity and interest,” he says. “And we just take it on faith that there are a lot of people who share those curiosities and those interests with us. And if so, they will buy our products and they’ll watch our movies. Maybe you don’t have to sell to everybody. Maybe there’s enough people like us."

How does he measure the impact, say, a movie project has on the bottom line? "I don’t have a spreadsheet that shows what good it does," he answers. "We’ve sort of been happy without spreadsheets now for about 13 years. We do a lot of things just because we wanna do them. Many people who buy Field Notes have no idea what Coudal is, but Coudal.com is the spine of the operation. And so if people come there and appreciate the films we make and the contests we do and the things we write and the jokes that we make, then those people will turn into Field Notes customers or they’ll watch Layer Tennis or they will advertise their product on The Deck or they will click on a Deck ad."

3 questions Coudal asks before deciding to take on a projectCan we make money from it? We’re a going business. We have mortgages to pay. We have tuitions to pay for our kids. We’re not ashamed of making money.

Are we gonna be proud of it when we’re done? There’s nothing that will break your heart faster than working three months on a project and then, when it’s all done, you’ve sold your soul and compromised and you don’t even want anybody to see it.

Have we learned something new? That allows us to continue to grow in the skills that we have. It allows us to be better filmmakers and writers and coders and art directors. And it keeps things interesting.

That audience also appreciates the firm’s transparent approach to business, according to Coudal. "We have never been reticent to talk about what we’re doing while we’re doing it," he says. "And that, I think, is a relatively new phenomenon in American business. No other ad network ever put their price up on the front page. It was all a negotiated business. It started out over steaks and martinis. We discuss why we made a decision about pricing or how we’re gonna approach a problem.

"I think since there are a lot of people who, in various fields, feel like they would like to have the same control over their work as we appear to have over ours, they’re interested in that and so that builds us an audience of customers who are like us — which is really a different thing than, ‘Here’s my brand. Love it.’ It’s more like, ‘Well, we are making this and if you’re like us, you’ll appreciate it for the same reason we made it.’

And despite the negative associations from his days of doing client work, Coudal admits it paved the way for the firm’s current approach. He says, "The client work taught us how to be filmmakers, how to be writers and art directors, how to build websites, how to write headlines, and how to negotiate with printers. All of these things that we sort of take for granted that we have in our toolbox, we learned all that working on other people’s business."

The next swing?
As for the future, the company has more big plans for Field Notes and The Deck. But Coudal wants to make sure there are new ideas in the mix too. "Field Notes and The Deck are both companies that are growing and profitable and take a lot of work to maintain and to move forward with. But it’s not the same as jumping into the deep end on something," he says. "We used to have a new idea every couple of weeks and most of them were terrible but now we’re just having a new idea every couple of months — and they’re still mostly terrible so you need to get up to bat a lot to hit a lot. If you don’t swing once in a while, you can’t expect to hit one out.

It all goes back to the curiosity thing. "Our number one value isn’t in any of the skills we have. It’s that we’re essentially curious,” he explains. “I think everybody who’s good creatively gets bored easily. That’s the thing. If you’ve done it before, then do something else. When we start a new company, I guarantee it’s not gonna be anything to do with notebooks."

“Our number one value isn’t in any of the skills we have. It’s that we’re essentially curious.”

Inspriing story for those of us in a similar position, moving from customer consulting work to building our own products.

Good reminder as well to appreciate that the client work gave you the skills and the bootstrap startup money to build your products.

Might also be good to keep the client work going as well. New opportunities and ideas can arise. The difference, is if you have your own products (diversified) you have the luxury of choosing your client work.

Tom

on 29 Mar 11

I’m not convinced.

If I can’t tell what a company/website does within 5 seconds of visiting, I’m out of there. Perhaps I have a terrible attention span, but I’m definitely not alone. The Coudal site has always baffled me – it feels very disorientating.

What’s the USP of Field Notes? Jim knocks Moleskine, but how are these different, better? Being made in America isn’t enough for me (not least as I’m based outside the US). The books remind me of the quirky little 1940s spoof guidebooks that appear in bookstores around Christmas time, the type of thing people pick up, say “that’s nice”, then put it down again.

I wonder if the reason they have targeted clothing stores rather than stationary stores is because they know they couldn’t compete in stationary stores?

The Deck is a great idea though, well executed.

Michael

on 29 Mar 11

I was really hoping this article was coming. Thank you!

David Andersen

on 29 Mar 11

“We never really maximized our creative potential by, I can say it, whoring ourselves out to people who knew less than we did,” he says. “If you have the skills to do client work, you have the skills to make your own product. You’re selling yourself short by selling that on a work for hire basis.”

Truer words were never uttered.

Anonymous Coward

You had me at “beer-swirling mammal killer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan”.

GregT

on 29 Mar 11

I kept reading the Field Notes site trying to figure out in what way this isn’t exactly the same as a cheap notebook I could get at WalMart for $.50. I thought maybe for $10 I could at least print my own front page or something, but I don’t think so.

This looks like a triumph of marketing and the kind of thing I would be a bit ashamed to be making money off of. Then again, money is money, I’d still do it.

Anonymous Coward

on 29 Mar 11

JD – how are these guys your heroes? They seem more like glorified snake oil salesmen to me.

JD

on 29 Mar 11

Anonymous Coward, they’re my heroes because they are just so creative and they act on that inspiration.

Steve Delahoyde, an employee of theirs, instant messaged me one day and asked if I could help out on an idea he had. He wanted to make a film about climbing a snow mountain behind their office. I said “sure”. I went over there for an afternoon and helped them shoot footage for their short film Above the Sun.

You get 3 (not 1, not 2, but 3! That’s right) Field Notes in the $10 package. And I love them. The cheaper ones at walmart fall apart and don’t absorb the ink well from my pen of choice. I’ve tried the Moleskine cahiers and the Action notebooks from Behance and the field notes are the best for me.

I am struck by the attitude of confidence (arrogance? let’s use confidence) of Coudal and 37signals. Most of my peers take pleasure in serving a customer or client and consider it the core of their job. Maybe it’s just the client relationship that gets irritating and rubs thin. Or the ownership issue that Jim raises. They both had excellent customer service when I needed it. So it’s working for them.

Anonymous Coward

on 29 Mar 11

Thanks for explaining JD. I kind of glossed over their site and was surprised at the level of praise given their products appear, at a distance, to be expensive and not-so-special. Now I see you are more talking about their people/culture/brand etc. Fair enough.

Steve Bradford – thanks for the correction on what you get for a tenner. Still way more than I’d be willing to pay, but I guess some people take their notes pretty seriously.

ML

on 29 Mar 11

To add on to what Steve said re: Field Notes, I find the size of ‘em to be perfect for slipping in a pocket and carrying around. Moleskines are too bulky to do that comfortably. And the cardboard stock on the FN covers seems just the right weight to let you do the back pocket thing without causing too much damage to the book when you sit.

Sorry for the double post. — Thank you for saying that. It was something I’d been trying to articulate in my head for about a year, but couldn’t figure out how to say it.

Anonymous

on 29 Mar 11

Hey now, hipsters and “upper peninsula mammal killers” BOTH swill beer. The SAME beer at that!

BillP

on 29 Mar 11

Field Notes remind me of my Grandfather. He carried old Grain elevator memo books in his shirt pocket all of his life. We still have some of his old ones with listings of grain sold, money spent, etc.

60 years later, my Grandpa’s memo books they are still in fine shape… I expect the Field Notes books to last that long as well.

I can’t put a $ figure on that type of feeling. Add a Bic clic pen and it seals the deal. Sappy and sentimental, yes. But I will use nothing else.

Thanks Mr. Coudal…

Joe

on 29 Mar 11

Well done post. Thanks, Jim, for sharing your insight.

David Andersen

on 29 Mar 11

@Steve Bradford -

Steve, I’m a consultant (for now) and I completely understand what you are saying (taking pleasure serving a customer) and what Coudal is saying (whoring yourself out to people who know less). I agree with both.

The big problem with consulting is that so many variables are out of your control when delivering the end result. Most (not all) customers want you to fulfill their vision with your expertise, even if their vision – to be frank – sucks. That’s being a whore. Not all consulting, I realize, works this way, but most of it does.

There is another path, though. A few can rise to the top and then clients seek you out to implement your vision (think world famous architects) instead of theirs. But when you decide to build products you get to chart your own course faster, answer to yourself and live with the results, for better or for worse. I completely identify with that sort of thinking.

This is tremendous. I love the “how they were born” stories of tech outfits I respect.

But, Jim, “blogging” existed as a word and as an activity as least two years before 2001. Here’s a use of it from July 1999 (though there are no doubt earlier uses to be found):

http://j.mp/fGrKC2

Jimbo

on 30 Mar 11

Ive been using Field Notes for a year. Great cleanup tool after a fap.

Nick Campbell

on 30 Mar 11

While I like a lot of Coudal’s products, I love their marketing more. The simple vignettes showing what they do are beautiful and the Agency.com – Subway mocking was unabashedly fun. That’s when I really started to respect them for being themselves and not caring if they tread on some toes along the way.

I’m somewhat responsible for the Coudal/Draplin partnership. I remember sitting next to Jim at a SXSW (2003 or 2004) and telling him about my old friend Aaron Draplin who I went to school with in the early 1990s. I dragged him kicking and screaming into blogging way back in 1998 and he told me about his Field Notes idea back in 2000 or 2001. Coudal gets credit for recognizing a great idea, making the partnership happen and handling the logistics of printing and fulfillment. Fantastic job all the way around.

Curtissimo

Onlooker

on 31 Mar 11

“Whoring”?

I suppose doing client work is what you make of it. Agreed, client work can be a pain in the ass. But, if you not happy with the clients you have, whose fault is that? I have great clients that I love working with and (I am pretty sure) love my work… which is why they continue to pay me. Admittedly, it was not easy to find great clients and there were a few bad clients along the way. But I really don’t consider doing client work “Whoring”?

That is a shitty way to describe it.

Paddy

on 01 Apr 11

This is a great story,

Im interested in the day to day when you have multiple “companies” being spawned within the one organisation.

I like the way this bloke thinks.
Inspiring piece on Jim, a straight shooter.
Great to find out the back story of Field Notes.

David Andersen

on 02 Apr 11

@Onlooker – sometimes the truth is shitty.

OnLooker

on 02 Apr 11

@David…

And what “truth” would that be. If your a consultant who does web design, your a whore? What if you a programmer who does client work… whore as well? What about an accountant who does taxes for people… apparently all whores eh?

Suppose you went up to someone who does client work, no matter what type, and said to them… you know your a whore, I wonder what type a response you would get.

David Andersen

on 03 Apr 11

@OnLooker -

The truth that sometimes, for some consultants, it’s whoring. What I mean by that, and what I think Coudal means, is that it’s providing your expertise on their terms. In other words, you’ve got to do it their way, not necc. the way you think/know is best.

Coudal is not stating that all client work for all consultants is whoring oneself out. No one here has said that. But apparently he feels his work was that way and I can tell you that in 95% of my work it feels that way. I’ve been lucky to have 5% of the cases where it doesn’t. It sounds like your percentage is much higher and good for you. My perception is that it’s easier to do your own thing and make a living in some consulting fields than others. Mine is tougher, though not impossible. Part of that has to do with the choices I’ve made; choices I could change.

OnLooker

on 03 Apr 11

@David,

I see what you are saying and your right, I took Coudal’s “whoring” statement out of context. After re-reading the post, he felt like HE was whoring, not that all consultants are whoring.

I still contend that, with allot of work and effort you CAN find great clients, just like you can build a great product. In both cases, the path to happiness (with your craft) is not going to be easy, but very rewarding if achieved.

Michael

on 04 Apr 11

I’m laughing at the guy who buys a .50c flip notebook from Wal-Mart. I can only assume he purchases notebooks frequently because he loses them or they fall apart. Or, he never actually writes in them.

If I’m going to spend ten hours writing in a notebook and consulting it, I want it to be a quality experience. Field notes cost $3.33 for a notebook but that comes out to around 30 cents an hour extra I’m paying to record notes in a pleasurable and reliable way. Plus, I can order Field Notes online. Walmart costs me a ton of time and some gas.

Michael

on 04 Apr 11

That said, I only buy the “This is Wednesday” specials which reduce the cost per notebook considerably.

Peaches

on 04 Apr 11

I cannot help but notice the age difference between caudal and the 37signals team. Is there truth in the knee pad rumor?

Aaron

on 04 Apr 11

Huh?

A marketing company that sells overpriced spiral notebooks? Certainly a strange twist, but increasing your short term profits by being able to do your own marketing is hardly a good business model.

Moleskins will be around for a long time after this fad has passed, no matter how it’s spelled or where it’s manufactured because people will read how Ernest Hemingway & Pablo Picasso used a generic product that the owners of a misspelled trademark are selling.

A phony marketing campaign targeting wannabe hipsters (circa 2008) is no comparison. You paid for advertising on a website that hired the guy that invented a minor programming framework back in 2003 to do what?

It’s great and satifying when people want to use something you’ve created or built. It’s also really rewarding when you’ve worked with a client on a project which is a success, not just in financial terms.

I can see the point about working in something you don’t believe in, which is your own fault for choosing something you didn’t want to do just for the money to pay the bills. Many clients have unique ideas and partnering with them enables you to work with them to help make it happen.

This discussion is closed.

About Matt Linderman

Now: The creator of Vooza, "the Spinal Tap of startups." Previously: Employee #1 at 37signals and co-author of the books Rework and Getting Real.